Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Feasibility study of a resistive-type sodium aerosol detector with ZnO nanowires for sodium-cooled fast reactors

  • Jewhan Lee (Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) ;
  • Da-Young Gam (Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) ;
  • Ki Ean Nam (Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) ;
  • Seong J. Cho (School of Mechanical Engineering, Chungnam National University) ;
  • Hyungmo Kim (School of Mechanical Engineering, Gyeongsang National University)
  • Received : 2022.11.14
  • Accepted : 2023.03.31
  • Published : 2023.07.25
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Abstract

In sodium systems, leakage is one of the safety concerns; it can cause chemical reactions, which may result in fires. There are contact and non-contact types of leak detectors, and the conventional method of non-contact type detection is by gas sampling. Because of the complexity of this method, there has always been a need for a simple gas sensor, and the resistive-type nanostructure ZnO sensor is a promising option with various advantages. In this study, a ZnO sensor was fabricated, and the concept was tested as a leak detector using a dedicated experiment facility. The experiment results showed distinctive changes in resistance with the presence of sodium aerosol under various conditions. Replacing the conventional gas sampling with the ZnO sensors is expected to enable identification of the leakage location if used as a point-wise instrumentation and to greatly reduce the total cost, making the system simple, light, and effective. For further study, more tests will be performed to evaluate the sensitivity of key parameters under various conditions.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIT) (No. 2021M2E2A2081063, 2022M2E2A2079840, and 2021M2D1A1084836).

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